Isn’t it time criminal mastermind Fu Manchu made a return to the big screen?

The dastardly exploits of Sax Rohmer’s fictional character put the Chinese tourist industry back a few years in the first half of the 20th Century with his ever inventive schemes for world domination.

One of his most fiendishly diabolical plans included coating the lips of some brain-washed babes with a rare man-killing poison who are then sent off to seduce the world’s leaders. What a plot! Jane Austen eat your heart out.

Fu Manchu was an oriental version of Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Professor Moriarty, and also had a detective rival in the shape of Nayland Smith and his sidekick Dr Petrie.

Rohmer described his protagonist as ‘a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, … one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present … Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.”

Yikes! You don’t want to be ordering your chicken balls from this bloke.

Rohmer’s portrayal of an Oriental baddie offended a lot of people with its negative stereotyping. There are some hilariously over sensitive comments including the claim that it ‘perverted Chinese masculine expression’ and was an assault of ‘effeminate stereotypes on Asian men.’

Rohmer responded bullishly to saying that his portrayal of Fu Manchu was “fundamentally truthful” because “criminality was often rampant among the Chinese.”

It’s a good job the English aren’t so sensitive about always being typecast as bounders and cads.